Everyone here is a work of art

It was 1982, and two American twentysomethings were about to jump-start their careers. One was a young man from South Carolina, first in his family to attend college, who that year joined the Air Force as a lawyer. The other was a young woman from the Detroit suburbs, a University of Michigan dropout living in New York, who managed that year to get a nightclub DJ to play her demo tape. This past weekend, they were both in the news: Senator Lindsey Graham, who died Saturday night of an aortic dissection at 71, and his near-contemporary Madonna, who with her new dance music album “Confessions II” holds the number 1 spot on the Billboard 200 chart. She is about to turn 68 and very much alive. 

On Sunday, tributes and the opposite of tributes poured in for Graham as people absorbed the unexpected news. (Per the Washington Post’s AI summary of reader response to the obituary: “The comments reflect a predominantly negative view of Lindsey Graham, focusing on his perceived loss of integrity….Many commenters express disdain for his political actions and legacy.”) Graham, who was long rumored but never confirmed to be gay and who reportedly put off seeking medical attention on Saturday night till after a scheduled Sunday TV appearance, seemed to have died prioritizing work over his own well-being. His politics were not always so unnuanced as they became—though it is now hard to believe, Graham once worked on bipartisan plans for gun control and climate change mitigation, and called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot” and “the world’s biggest jackass.” But he had pivoted in his last years to pure sycophancy, defending the president on nearly everything. Now Trump had outlived him, and any chance at a final act was gone.

As Graham and his image turned over in the back of my mind on Sunday, I suddenly realized the album I’d been listening to in the background all day, from a pop star who had risen to top the charts once more, had been made by his almost exact contemporary. I had somehow lost Madonna’s thread since her “Confessions on a Dance Floor” album of 2005. While she released four albums, none of them had a sharp enough vision to break out beyond her fandom. Her image seemed to grow more fixed, without the shapeshifting between eras that she demonstrated long before Taylor Swift was born. She got older and yet, with that eerie Hollywood quality we now expect, seemed hardly to age, while looking more and more like a wax doll of her younger self.

For the new “Confessions II,” however, Madonna reunited with her “Confessions” producer Stuart Price and somehow sounds like herself again. The album is in one sense formulaic dance-pop of the kind she pioneered and that is now a mainstay of the Top 40. But it’s also sort of a music memoir, like “Just Kids” if you made it as a Madonna album. (“I feel like my brain is tuned into memory and how it’s all connected and where it has brought me,” the singer told Interview magazine.) Fading one song into the next like a DJ, Madonna extols the pleasures of losing yourself on the dance floor, as she’s been doing since that first 1982 demo for “Everybody”: “Everybody / Come on, dance and sing…Music makes the world go around.” “Into the Groove” (1985) and “Vogue” (1990) were in some ways just increasingly sophisticated versions of that same song. In the new “Danceteria,” named for that formative nightclub, she extends the tradition but also relates the story of her breakthrough for that first single: “Then I see Mark Kamins is the DJ / He’s the DJ, hide the cocaine / He played my tape “Everybody” / This is how we start the party…Everybody get up and dance.”

That track packs in a lot more, too. Within the same song, she somehow manages to sing the “doo doodoos” from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” sample the same bongo solo deployed by C+C Music Factory in “Things that Make You Go Hmmmm…”, and namedrop a list of clubgoers in the rhythm of her “Dietrich and DiMaggio” spoken-word interlude from “Vogue.” But now, decades later, the names she’s citing aren’t just icons “on the cover of a magazine.” They’re real people—friends, collaborators, lovers, fellow artists—from that time at the club. Of these icons of the early ’80s, some became famous; a number of them, like Danceteria doorman Haoui Montaug (read this amazing Interview magazine oral history), lost their lives directly or indirectly to the AIDS epidemic. So this roll call rings differently, and if the music and chorus of “Danceteria” are at first listen derivative, it turns out the main person she’s deriving them from is herself. It’s a song with a purpose: to tell the story of just how she ended up soundtracking that dance floor, and now all of our dance floors, for nearly 45 years.

I don’t know what Lindsey Graham was doing in 1982, besides serving in the Air Force, but I’m pretty sure he was not at Danceteria. If he was part of that generation of gay men, he was perhaps lucky not to be. Unsuspecting adults when AIDS hit, a few years too early to survive until the development of effective drug cocktails in the 1990s, this particular mid-Boomer generation was decimated by the disease. Lindsey Graham, by the 1990s, had made it to the U.S. Congress, where he fought gay rights for years and years. As a member of the House and then the Senate, he voted against gay marriage, against employment protections for gay Americans, against gays in the military, time after time from his entry into politics until his death.

Again, I don’t know what to make of Graham’s personal life, and in a sense it is none of my business. As John Casey wrote in The Advocate, “Lindsey Graham died a lonely man. Whatever else gets written about him this week, I don't think that part is up for debate.” But I do care how he spent those years from 1982 to this past weekend, as his star, like Madonna’s, rose. It’s both frustrating and depressing to watch someone embrace the very opposite of the motto that, as Madonna says in “Danceteria,” “Everyone here is a work of art.” If they are, if we are, we shine despite the efforts of a pure Trumpist like Graham became. That is a philosophy devoted to the cynical mirror image of Madonna’s line: Everyone here is a human resource, to be valued, exploited, or discarded by the powerful at will. To believe that about others is sad. If Lindsey Graham believed it about himself, that is, somehow, even worse.

Just kidding, I actually do not recommend the combination of smoke from distant wildfires with scorching hot temperatures, but it certainly makes for interesting skies at night. It is also stone fruit season, and that I do recommend, but really I recommend appreciating anything you can grow, forage, or buy that is not full of the parasite that gives you explosive diarrhea, which unfortunately we are now consigned to talk about all day long.

If you’re not growing anything yourself, you can at least live vicariously through these blobby baby pomegranates over by Washington’s National Cathedral.

How are the skies near you? Send me your orangest photos. And if you’ve come this far: thanks so much for reading. If you haven’t done so already, please consider upgrading to become a paid member, which will allow you to expound in the comments on what else Lindsey Graham and Madonna have in common. There’s gotta be something. See you next time.